Universe Today
Even though NASA's Dawn spacecraft
has departed Vesta
the trove of data it's gathered about this fascinating little world continues to fuel new discoveries. Most recently, some researchers are suggesting that Vesta's curious grooves -- long, deep troughs that wrap around its equator, noticed immediately after Dawn came within close proximity -- are actually features called
graben
, the results of surface expansion along fault lines.
In Vesta's case, the faults likely may have come from whatever major collision created the enormous
central peak
that rises almost three times the height of Mt. Everest from its south pole... and the expansion could be the result of differentiation of its interior -- a separation of core, mantle and crust that's much more planet-like than anything asteroidish.
On smaller asteroids and moons, stress fractures tend to have a "V" shape, cutting inwards to a sharp point. But the troughs on Vesta are more rounded, with a "U" shape that results from surface material slumping downwards as the surface pulls apart. Found on larger worlds like
Earth
, the
Moon
,
Mars
,
Mercury
-- and now possibly Vesta as well -- graben are shaped by motions below the crust and not just the splitting of the surface.
The biggest of Vesta's troughs, Divalia Fossa, is 465 kilometers (289 miles) long, 22 km (13.6 mi) wide and 5 km (3 mi) deep... longer and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
If the researchers are correct and these are indeed graben, rather than just fractures or grooves carved into the surface by another process, Vesta probably had a lot more going on inside it than does your typical asteroid.
"By saying it's differentiated, we're basically saying Vesta was a little planet trying to happen," said Debra Buczkowski of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), lead author of a new paper titled "Large-scale troughs on Vesta: A signature of planetary tectonics" scheduled to be published by the
AGU
on Sept. 29.
Read more: Is Vesta a Planet Among Asteroids?
Unlike its big sister Ceres, the largest world among the asteroids and Dawn's next destination, Vesta isn't officially classified as a dwarf planet because its shape isn't spherical enough -- a flagrant violation of IAU Planetary Code Regulation No. 2. Rather it's more flattened, like a walnut. This of course is also likely the result of the impact Vesta sustained at its south pole (which also may be responsible for its rapid 5.35-hour rotation rate, helping to bulge out the equatorial region and possibly even provide an alternate source for the trough "stretch marks") and so begs the question, was Vesta once a dwarf planet? And if so, does severe reconstruction by an impact event "reclassify" it as something else? What, then? Ex-dwarf planet? A planet-formerly-known-as-dwarf?An
undwarf?
I'm sure the IAU is already anticipating the contretemps.
– Chris Russell, Dawn mission principal investigator at UCLA
Read more on the American Geophysical Union's press release
here
, and follow the latest from NASA's Dawn mission
here
.